DDR-3000 C12: you have to bin a lot of ICs to get ones with the right voltage/performance characteristics for that kit. Same reason why the more expensive CPUs are also the faster (in MHz numbers or cores) than the cheaper ones.Reply

True. But you can get DDR 2666 with CL10 for about 100€, so a set with an 7% shorter access time (higher "PI" as Ian insists on calling it), and only a 11% lower transfer rate for about a fifth of the price.The 500$ kit seems to be exclusively for those who don't have to work for their money, or maybe those who are hunting records as a hobby.Reply

Exactly, they have to test the ICs individually with those tester kits and bin them for speed. I just find it amazing that a chip that is designed for say, 1600 C11 at 1.5v has the potential to run 3100 C12 with 1.65v, that's nearly double its rated clock speed with a mere 0.15v bump in voltage.Reply

When it comes to memory, over the years I have tried to read up on different reviews and look at benchmarks in an attempt to understand when it is better to run tighter timings/lower MHz as opposed to looser timings/higher bandwidth. I'm sure it is a case by case basis, but was wondering if the always knowledgeable and helpful Anandtech commenters could give me a quick, dummy terms, explanation of when tight timings or clockspeed is better? Looking at your graph, it shows the C7 1866 through C10 2666 all having the same performance index score, but what situations do those different timings/MHz become better/worse? I hope this isn't too in depth of a question.

I don't know if this analogy is correct, but I'm seeing it as if RAM was a race car on a track, high bandwidth/loose timings would mean your car travels faster, but has to do more laps around the track to complete. Tight timings/lower bandwidth means the car travels slower but doesn't have to do as many laps to complete. If I am correct on this, at what point does less laps trump traveling faster?

As a side note, I am looking to build a Haswell desktop in Jan/Feb. It will have one GPU (probably one of the R9's) and more than likely a 2x8gb RAM kit. My usage would very roughly be 70% gaming, 25% rendering in 3DS Max and using some Adobe programs, 5% or less video encoding. I'm looking for help in deciding what to look for in this scenario, but also to finally have a better understanding of how these settings affect different workloads.

Ian has a pretty in depth article on this subject, look back thru the archives.

Memory prices haven't increased as much as I thought, if at all... I bought a 1600 4x4GB Patriot kit last year, precisely around this time, it was like $55 or something with a discount (I remember not seeing any better deals around Black Friday). My first exposure to Patriot too but it's worked out well.Reply

I'm not so sure about that, I bought a 32gb 1866 G.Skill Ares kit in December of last year for $109.99 (I'm looking at the invoice) and now the same kit is $283.49 (newegg). That's a huge price increase in my book.Reply

Did you used to have Hyper memory on Nehalem by any chance? That combination had issues above 1.75 volts. I have not encountered any issues running memory up to 1.75v on Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge or Haswell. All my chips just work. Otherwise 1.65 volt kits wouldn't be selling as well as they do, and overclockers wouldn't be pushing 1.8v on air / 2.0+ volts on liquid nitrogen.Reply

Yes, because extreme overclockers care so much about longevity. Ian, you should make an effort to get out of the extreme OC and corporate PR echo chambers once and a while. It is really having an effect on the quality of your articles. Reply

Expanding upon this point: the data in Anandtech articles is always top notch, but it is becoming more and more obvious that there are two tiers of reviewers when it comes to delivering insight. Anand, Brian, Ryan, and Jarred write good conclusions based on their data and don't care about any blowback from the manufacturers. Dustin and Ian seem beholden to the manufacturer's PR departments and just parrot whatever talking points they're given. It's really disappointing.Reply

And who exactly do you think is going to be interested in a kit like this, other than overclockers? The review fit the product and the target audience. It's not for general users, never will be, and doesn't need to be reviewed as if it were.Reply

Patriot has changed the ICs on this kit without changing the SKU. I have two of the 2x4GB kits that only have 8 chips on a single side of the PCB and none on the other, and use Hynix H5TQ4G83MFR 4Gbit ICs (the same ones that are on those DDR3-3000+ kits) and clock accordingly. One kit I bought but took back was like these in the review, double-sided sticks with 16 chips per stick (8 per side) and using a relatively new IC, Hynix H5TQ2G83DFR, which can't clock as high as H5TQ2G83CFR unfortunately.Reply

The reason is that defining latency as a multiple of clocks is rather silly with a large range of clock speeds available concurrently. What your CL7 means is that you have a latency of 4.38 ns (7/1600MHz). The fastest latencies in other clockings available are:

You missed the part where they asked for low latency 1600 and you quoted a 1600 at CL6 without saying where it's from. Like they said, most 1600 kits come at around CL9 which is around 5.63ns. This matters somewhat when Intel CPUs such as the i7 4770K are rated at 1600, any higher and you're running out of spec. Reply

Not sure how I "missed" that, it doesn't say anything about a 1600 kit at CL9 in the question :" I only ever see CL9 (and up) kits in reviews "Well, most kits in reviews and announced sales are probably not 1600 at this point in time. In the review above you see 5 kits at 2400+, with only a single 1600 kit thrown in for completeness. So I assumed that the original poster was expecting DDR3 2400 to also come with CL7. Sorry if that assumption was incorrect.

The quoted CL6 kits are "OCZ Reaper HPC Edition" (OCZ3RPR1600C6LV4GK) and "Super Talent Chrome Series" (WB160UX6G6). I think both are actually discontinued, because you can buy a 2400 CL9 set and just run it at 1600 CL6. As shown above, you could even buy a 2400 CL10 set and get a little lucky and still run it at 1600 CL6 (same latency as the tested 1866 CL7)

So sure, DDR3 1600 kits are rarely sold with very low latencies today, that's because low-latency kits are validated and sold at higher frequencies. This does not matter very much, since all kits come with a JEDEC setting to run 1600 initially, and everybody who knows he needs better latencies can lower them by hand to the actual achievable latency. Kits sold as 1600 are really mainly for people looking for cheap memory. Which is fine, as most reviews show little to no relevant gain from faster memory for most tasks anyways.Reply

No, I wasn't expecting 2400 to come in CL7, but thanks for the assistance. My point is really that kits which qualify as low latency like many of those in your list, seem to be in very short supply and/or very expensive today. I don't think this was the case a couple years ago when there was higher availability. Reply

The ICs that could run at those latencies comfortably have long since been discontinued. They were mostly 1Gbit chips (128MB) made by Elpida and Powerchips, so the biggest sticks you could get out of them were 2GB. Most memory these days are 4GB and 8GB sticks and the ICs used can't run low latencies at speeds of 1600.Reply

Honestly I thought that for a long time, too. But Ian's work is extremely technical and thorough, and once you get into the intricacies of it, there's a lot to learn. I've been spending a lot of time delving into the effects of high speed memory and while 90% of the time it's not important, those weird 10% corner cases can be very compelling.

Playing around with memory can be very interesting in general, and a lot of users swear by high speed memory because it just *seems* smoother. Every build and every system is essentially a game of moving bottlenecks around, and there's some value in being able to take memory speed out of that equation.Reply

And yet the charts show that there is no difference for most use cases. Good data is a great thing to have. However, you shouldn't throw that data out the window and make conclusions based on emotions like you've done in your second paragraph. (Ian is just as guilty of this, so you're in good company.)Reply

This seems like a pretty good option. I've been a custom builder for the last years and I have always thought that it's really painful to keep track of all the different components. I've tried a couple of different solutions like Evernote, but started using a new startup called Unioncy the other day. Found it quite helpful since they track warranties for you. Might be worth a try if you are building a lot like me.Reply

While this review is technically interesting up to a point, it reinforces a view I've had of the tech press for a while now: there is far too much attention on high end halo products which have norelevance to most buyers. In this case, it appears we're embarking on a review of massively expensive options for ram when the existing tests show absolutely no performance difference whatsoever between these high priced kits and ddr3 1333 ones. Triple the price for an extra 1fps? Recommended!

Any idiot spending hundreds of dollars on ram can afford to replace what he doesn't like. Where are the reviews of budget motherboards, ram kits, processors? The only people who really need to know what the latest $700 processor running on a $400 motherboard with $200 of ram and a $600 graphics card can do can afford to replace what they think isn't good enough and are probably upgrading every 6 months anyway.

You know who *needs* reviews? The guy replacing a $5-600 build from 3 or 4 years ago with the same price, and is faced with hundreds of choices. He can't afford to buy the wrong part and the parts he's choosing from are far more superficially varied and difficult to evaluate.

Needless to say, if you want to find out if $500 card x is significantly faster than $500 card y from 6 months ago, a hundred sites will tell you. Comparing a $100 processor? nope.

The graphs in this article and the last one tell us all we need to know about high end memory: it makes no difference. Please move on! Reply

Indeed, or for those of us that found girls, moved out, got older, changed hobbies, just realised that running benchmarks all day is a waste of life or found that actually the world doesn't end if you don't upgrade your PC every 6-12 months.

There is a need for some sites that analyse how the current $60-$200 GPUs compare with those of 5 years ago, same for CPUs etc. Big market for that kind of info but unfortunately all we get is "this sites for enthusiasts noob!" well thanks but I'm still an enthusiast but now I have a mortgage or I'm only earning half what I was 5 years ago.

In the conclusion you should add one bar to one of your charts... a bar where the RAM is at 1600 but the cpu is clocked just 100MHz higher, to really highlight how little impact memory speeds have on performance compared to even a tiny cpu clock speed boost.Reply

Ian can you give a little more information about the size of your CPU computer benchmarks specifically the grid size on the finite difference problems. In my experience memory bandwidth plays a large role in the speed of the computation. There are many HPC applications that have memory as the bottleneck and I'm wondering if your problem size is small enough that it is being efficiently handled by the cache and the ram speed isn't making much of an influence. In know in my own CFD code going from 1600 to 1866 showed an almost linear speed up. Reply